Actually, simple hydraulics and electronics have natural analogies, in that similar equations can be used for both. Milliamp-hours is a unit of charge, 1 mAh == 3.6 coloumbs, or about the charge in 3.73e-05 moles worth of electrons, so yes, it would be accurate to say that mAh can be analogised to the volume of a tank of petrol, as charge would be the equivalent of fluid volume in hydraulics. However, voltage, being in units of energy per unit charge (a volt is 1 joule per coloumb), is more like fluid pressure in hydraulics (joules per cubic metre or pascals), or at how much pressure the fuel is being sent out the gas tank, so the article is completely wrong on that score. The "amount of fuel the device is drawing" is more like current, which is measured in amperes (coloumbs per second), which would be the equivalent of flow rate in hydraulics (cubic metres per second). Thus, if you had a battery rated at 1500 mAh used on a device that drew 100 mA of current from it on use, you'd be able to use it for about 15 hours before you needed to recharge the batteries. In a similar way, if you had a tank with a volume of 1500 cubic metres and were pumping liquid out at 100 cubic metres per hour, you'd need to refill it after 15 hours.

Well, if they're going to do that, well, a logical step to take would be that that they'd make it so that you can declare war on rival city-states and attack them and conquer them. At which point it stops being Sim City and turns into Civilization.

Apple has just become Big Brother in their 1984 Superbowl Ad

. The irony.

I always thought the reason was as simple as this: "I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this... Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google you f***ing ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product." -- Steve Jobs

I do hope that they back it up with a PIN, making it full three-factor authentication. While biometrics are useful in being unique identifiers, they are not secrets. An attacker could use the gummi bear fingerprint technique using latent fingerprints extracted from a stolen card...

I'll shoot back with a quote from Leibniz:

Sans les mathématiques on ne pénètre point au fond de la philosophie. Sans la philosophie on ne pénètre point au fond des mathématiques. Sans les deux on ne pénètre au fond de rien.

Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics. Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything.

Mathematics is the underpinning of all modern science, that tool that our species has for understanding the universe which has allowed human civilization to progress the way it has over the past six thousand years. This gives us an understanding of nature. Your poets, artists, and authors have, on the other hand, an understanding of people. A properly functioning society needs both in good measure, and by extension, the populace of such a society needs both as well.

The reason astronomers seem to dispute the potential for the existence of these intermediate mass black holes is that no one has yet shown convincing evidence that they exist, nor do they have any convincing theories on how they could be formed. No star is massive enough to have collapsed into the alleged IMBH GCIRS 13E, which is supposed to be 1300 solar masses. For several smaller stellar black holes to coalesce into something like GCIRS 13E, that seems far less likely. Away from galactic cores where everything is very close together, stellar collisions are extremely rare. Collisions between black holes considerably more so. Contrary to popular perception black holes are not the all-sucking vacuum cleaners of the universe. Their gravity is not so different from the gravity of any other object, except beyond the event horizon. A stellar black hole five times the mass of our sun would have no more ability to attract things to itself with gravity than a star of five solar masses. So while black holes could collide, in interstellar space they don't do so very frequently, as much of interstellar space is empty, and as such, a few hundred of them coming together to form an IMBH of a thousand or so solar masses is extremely unlikely to say the least. In galactic cores on the other hand things are so close together that accretion of stuff into a black hole there would tend to continue until there's a supermassive black hole, not stopping at the thousand or so solar masses that IMBHs are hypothesized to be. The only other explanation for the formation of IMBHs is that they are primordial black holes created a fraction of a second into the birth of the universe, but this is even more shaky to say the least. Regardless of the explanation, the fact is observational evidence for IMBHs is disputed, and is nowhere near as conclusive as the evidence for stellar and supermassive black holes is. Granted, they could exist in principle, but if observational evidence is flimsy and the conditions necessary for creating one so unlikely then one might be justified in doubting their existence.

The three valence quarks inside a proton for instance have a rest mass of only 11 MeV/c^2, which they get by means of the Higgs mechanism. The rest of the 938 MeV/c^2 that is the full rest mass of the proton is its quantum chromodynamic binding energy, that is the energies of the gluons that are keeping the three quarks together, so the Higgs mechanism accounts for only 1% of the mass of a composite particle like a proton. Not all mass is drag in the Higgs field. It is by no means the final word on the origin of all mass. If the Higgs mechanism was the only way particles could acquire their masses, then the neutrino should have zero mass, and well, it doesn't.

If you are old enough to remember what Microsoft was like around the late eighties and up until about the early-2000's, you would realize that they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were back then. Yes, they are still a very wealthy and profitable company, and will probably remain so for decades more, but they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were in the time I speak of. Back in those days Microsoft inspired such fear into the hearts of those in the software industry that before beginning a software venture people would ask: "What would Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from even getting started and risking competing with Microsoft head-on. Those days are long gone, and now the companies that have sort of inherited that mantle are Apple and Google (but it seems that even put together they don't have even half of the kind of terrifying aura Microsoft exuded back in those days). Their loss of this kind of power does not mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing, far from it. It simply means that they've become irrelevant to the leading edge of the software industry, just another stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP.

This is what Paul Graham meant when he wrote that Microsoft is Dead.

I seem to recall that MySpace and Friendster also achieved critical mass. I think it is naive to think that Facebook will not someday be supplanted in the same way as well. The main reason why G+ is stumbling in this respect is that they don't provide anything, not even better assurances over privacy (which is something people care little enough about) that is compelling enough for people to begin to use their G+ accounts more than they use their Facebook accounts. The thing here is that social network lock-in and network effects are weaker than say, Microsoft's lock-in and network effects with Windows. In the first place, nothing really prevents me from say, using both G+ and Facebook at the same time. If G+ or some other competing social network provides something really compelling, not just to me but to large numbers of users, I'd eventually find myself using Facebook less and less, and G+ more, and at some point it'd be hard to characterize me as a "Facebook user". At this point G+ does not seem to be giving people that kind of incentive. Think back on what killed off MySpace and Friendster. Friendster I remember had problems scaling their systems to handle the increasing load, and the poor responsiveness of their site was what caused people to migrate away from them to MySpace and Facebook in the way just described. I don't quite remember what happened with MySpace, because I never did make an account there, but I believe that Facebook had a much better user experience (ads not as intrusive, easier interface, less of an ability to make garish pages, etc.), and that's what caused people to gradually migrate.

Facebook had a P/E of 88 at their IPO, which means that they'll have to increase revenue at least sixfold to live up to the expectations set by their stock price. They can't increase their userbase much more: there just aren't enough people on the planet for that. Their revenue per ad is going down, so to increase revenues they'll have to make their ads occupy more and more of their page and become more intrusive. I think doing that was part of what killed off MySpace.

For GPS to be useful for detecting mines in this way you'd need to have accuracy of the order of half a meter. I can barely get accuracy of less than ten meters with ordinary GPS. I suppose this is possible to do with differential GPS but I have to ask how long does it take to lock, and how well does it work in minefields that have obstructions from direct line of sight. Just having a building or a tree in the way causes accuracy to drop off significantly, and may cause loss of GPS signal altogether. I would have thought that they'd use some other means of position measurment that is not subject to such limitations.

Which is why we should all avoid use of the term 'intellectual property'. Use of the term promotes precisely this sort of confusion.

2700ÂC is not just infernal I'd think. That temperature is nearly half the temperature of the sun's photosphere (5500ÂC). Iron melts at 1538ÂC, and boils at 2862ÂC. There could be clouds of iron vapor and rains of molten iron there. If it had any kind of atmosphere it would likely be made up of iron and silicon vapor.

That would be a like eating your seed corn. If someone is clever enough to have devised many patentable ideas, then firing that person is only best for the short term. It will also make people with bright ideas more reluctant to work for you, because you are seen to punish people for doing good work! But then again, short-sightedness is a well-known and even praiseworthy trait among the managers of American corporations these days...

My wife dug up my old C-64 from that storage room in my mom's old house just a couple of weeks ago, and now the first real computer I ever owned now sits in my garage, along with the 1541 disk drive. I don't know if she also managed to dig up all the old cables that came with it so I can turn it on again for old times' sake. I have to wonder if it still works: that thing has been in storage for more than 20 years, and not in the best of conditions. That machine gave me my start in life in the world of computing, and I remember fondly the days of PEEKing and POKEing machine language opcodes from a photocopied 6502/6510 reference manual I managed to dig up from a shop somewhere (after having convinced my parents to pay a not insignificant sum for it). It's part of what made me what I am today, and I'm not like to forget it.

Well Jack, I'd like to thank you for that bit of hardware that gave me and a million other geeks the start of their lives today.